Ask a North Korean: what's Pyongyang's street food speciality?

In an ongoing series, NK News poses a question from a reader to a North Korean defector. This week a reader asks whether South Korea’s most loved dishes – from famed hotteok to spicy oden – exist in Pyongyang?

Hotteok vendors do a great trade in South Korea, but are they as popular in the North? Photograph: /flickr

Before I came to South Korea, I had never heard of tteokbokki, the popular Korean dish made from soft rice cake, fish and sweet red chilli sauce. I had no idea food like that even existed.

When I tasted it for the first time, I couldn’t understand the appeal. But over time I’ve grown to like it very much, and now I have to admit I’m a big fan.

People used leftover soybeans and turned them into ​​sausages

The tteok in the name refers to the rice cake, the main ingredient: it’s sticky and tasty by itself, but when chilli pepper paste called gochujang is added, it adds an even richer, spicy and sweet flavour.

Tteokbokki is my comfort food: when I eat it, it feels as if it relieves my stress right away, especially when you eat it with a big bowl of hot soup – it tastes heavenly. Along with hotteok (filled pancake) and oden (spicy broth), it can be easily found on the streets of Seoul, the South’s capital city.

But they aren’t common in North Korea: there, the most popular street food is injo gogi bap (artificial meat rice), tofu bap (rice) and soondae(Korean traditional sausages).

Injo gogi would be called soy sausages in South Korea and western countries, and they derive from a difficult period in the country’s history. From 1995 to 1999 the DPRK experienced a serious financial crisis following the fall of the Soviet Union – a time known to North Koreans as the “arduous march”.

The combination of economic decline and the catastrophic flooding of the mid-1990s also prompted a famine, killing an estimated 500,000 people.

The Arduous March: growing up in North Korea during famine

Read more

During this time, North Koreans didn’t let any food go to waste. People used leftover soybeans and turned them into sausages.

Currently they’re mostly eaten with rice and spicy sauce, and they’ve since become a delicacy.

When Korea becomes unified again, I bet South Korean street foods like tteokbokki, hotteok and oden will be quite a shock to DPRK citizens. I look forward to the day when Koreans from both sides of the country can enjoy these street foods together.